Chapter Eleven
The Legion takes care of its own.
—traditional slogan, Fourth Foreign Legion, c. 2650
“It’s no good, lieutenant. It’d take a week in a repbay and a list of spare parts as long as a Toeljuk’s tentacles to get this baby running again.”
Colin Fraser frowned. “You said these carriers were working, Sergeant.”
“They were, Lieutenant,” Persson replied patiently. “As of the last check-up … and before you tried to take them through the jungle.”
Bravo Company’s vehicles were clustered in a large clearing surrounded by jungle. Monkeyville was nearly two hundred kilometers behind them now, and there had been little sign of pursuit. Legionnaire Ignaczak had shot down a hannie fighter plane pacing the column in the first hour of the retreat, but beyond that it looked as if they’d broken contact cleanly.
The trail they’d followed north away from the main road had been a good escape route, but an hour after leaving the main road Fraser ordered the column to turn east into the jungle. At that time the decision had seemed valid enough. The trail emerged from the rain forest and rejoined the main road net halfway between the capital, Jyeezjai, and Dryien’s second largest city, and Fraser wasn’t about to lead Bravo Company into that kind of danger again so soon. And the possibility of more aerial harassment while they remained on the open trail was something he had to consider as well. The two Sabertooth FSVs could knock down aircraft easily enough, but a really large-scale attack might be more than they could handle, especially given the restricted fields of fire on the jungle road.
Now, though, it seemed that his decision had been wrong.
“These Sandrays ain’t built to go bouncin’ off trees,” Persson continued as if to emphasize Fraser’s gloomy thoughts. “You can’t use them as battering rams without expecting to take some damage.”
“All right, Sergeant, you’ve made your point. How long will it take to transfer the supplies to another APC?”
“Maybe an hour, Lieutenant.” Persson paused. “A couple of hours if we do things right and strip the beast.”
“Strip it?”
“Yeah … pull out the electronics and the magrep modules, break down the fans for spare parts, that sort of thing.”
Fraser studied the damaged vehicle. It was one of the two cargo vans, stocked with food, ammo, and other gear. One of its fans had been knocked out, another damaged, and it was sagging on one side from a magrep module failure. He felt his fists tighten at his sides. A breakdown this early in the long journey was a bad sign. This would be enough to force some of the legionnaires to ride on the outside of other vehicles or travel on foot … and that would slow the column down.
Forcing himself to relax, he nodded. “All right. Do it the right way, Sergeant. But I’m holding you to that two hours. Don’t do anything that’ll end up taking longer.”
“Yes, sir.” Persson turned away, shouting for Corporal Weston.
Specialists in the transport platoon were cross-trained in mechanical maintenance and repair; Persson’s men would be able to handle the salvage work on their own. But transferring supplies from the supply vehicle into another Sandray would go faster with some extra help. Fraser sought out Sergeant Qazi and told him to round up a work detail, then headed back to the command van. Trent met him by the ramp.
“L-T, Garcia’s got something on the radio,” the sergeant said.
Legionnaire Garcia had suffered a sprained ankle and some bad bruising on her legs, but she was back on duty at the van’s C3 console. Trent seemed little the worse for wear, but Fraser thought the man looked exhausted. After the fighting outside Monkeyville, that wasn’t surprising.
“What is it, Gunny?”
Trent shook his head. “Can’t be sure, L-T. There’s a lot of static, and the signal’s pretty weak to begin with. But it’s on the platoon net assigned to Charlie Company, and a couple of clear spots sounded like human voices.”
Fraser locked eyes with Trent, startled. If some of Charlie Company had escaped after all…! “Did you try to raise them?”
“Garcia gave it a go, L-T, but there wasn’t an answer. She says they’re probably using helmet sets, and the range is just too long. All we’re getting is stray stuff, nothing coherent.”
“Yeah … or our hannie friends are using recordings.” Fraser looked away.
“Shit, L-T, you’re not going to ignore them, are you?” Trent looked angry. “We can’t just leave them!”
“God, Gunny … I don’t know!” Fraser suddenly felt dizzy, weak. One crisis after another, decision after decision … and a wrong choice at any turn could kill them all. “I just don’t know!”
“I could take out another patrol …” Trent was swaying with fatigue as he spoke.
“Forget it, Gunny,” Fraser told him. “You’ve done enough for one day.” He paused, wrestling with his doubts. “All right. Pass the word to Watanabe to get his platoon ready to move out—but leave the recon lance out of it. Mount them on one of the APCs, a Sabertooth, and one of the engineering vans. Uh … better have a couple of the other vehicles ready in case we do find survivors.”
“You’re putting Watanabe in charge, then? Good choice.…”
“I’ll take command myself, Gunny. If this is a trap, I’m not sending in any of those kids while I sit on my butt back here. Tell Fairfax he’s in charge if I don’t come back. And get the column moving again in two hours whether or not we’ve reported in. We’ll catch up.”
“L-T, I don’t think—”
“That’s an order, Gunny!” Fraser interrupted with more force than he’d intended. Now that he’d made the decision, he was impatient to go through with it.
Trent drew himself to attention and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
Fraser watched the sergeant as he left in search of Subaltern Watanabe. So many wrong decisions already … would this one go wrong, too?
He didn’t want to think of what would happen to Bravo Company if it did.
* * *
“How’d we get stuck with this detail, anyhow? Didn’t we do enough already?”
Slick grunted, ignoring Legionnaire Rostov’s complaining as he manhandled another box of supplies down the damaged cargo van’s ramp. The effort made his head throb, but he was glad to be working. Sitting in an APC while it lurched and swerved through the jungle had made his head hurt just as much, and there hadn’t been any way to take his mind off it.
Vrurrth picked up Slick’s box at the bottom of the ramp as if it was packed with feathers. “The fight, the work,” the alien rumbled, looking at Rostov. “The duties make us Legion.”
“Easy for you to say, big guy,” Rostov told him. “You’d think a fifty-klick hike was a nice way to rest. I’m tired.”
“Could be worse,” Slick ventured. “We might have had to go with the rest of the platoon on that run the lieutenant ordered.”
Rostov grinned. “Hell, at least I could get some sleep sitting on my ass in an APC!” He wrestled another box out of the stack and across the floor of the van. Slick took over at the top of the ramp. “It’s a good thing we’re not going, all the same. Corp’d probably tie you up and leave you in the back of the ’ray if we went out on another op.”
Slick felt himself flushing. Since waking up after the fight on the hilltop, he had been starting to feel accepted again. No one was likely to doubt his courage now, not after he’d taken on ten hannies alone! But underneath Rostov’s bantering tone he thought he detected a hint of genuine warning.
“What’re you talking about? Don’t tell me he’s still after me for that shit in the trench!”
“I’m talking about this morning, kid. That stunt you pulled was enough to get you a couple of weeks in cells. If—”
“Stunt? I saved the lance! Maybe the whole goddamned battle, for Chrissake!”
Rostov straightened up from the box in front of him. “You really don’t get it, do you, kid?”
“Get what? Why—”
“Look, you may have saved some lives this morning …”
“May have! There was a blunderbuss aimed right at DuPont—”
“Shut up, kid! I’m trying to help you.” Rostov pulled out a slender Medean cigarette and lit it. “Like I was saying, you might have saved some lives out there. But the way you did it was stupid … criminal, even. Did it ever occur to you to warn somebody about the monkeys?”
“Yeah, right,” Slick responded sourly. “With everybody already saying I’m a coward, I’m gonna call for help. No thanks, man.”
“Call for help! How about you call to report and ask for some orders? Hell, what are they teaching you nubes these days, anyway?”
“I used initiative,” Slick said firmly. Inside, though, Rostov’s words hit home.
“You wouldn’t know initiative if it sat up and bit you on the nose, nube. You were thinking with your pride, not your brains. For God’s sake, kid, I damn near snuffed you today ’cause I didn’t know you were up there. And where the hell would we have been if they’d killed you, huh? You report what you see and you follow orders.” Rostov spread his hands. “Get with the program, Grant. In the Legion we look after our own. That means we think about our buddies before we think about ourselves … and we don’t go hogging the glory and risking everything the way you did!”
“That’s real great advice, Rostov,” Slick said, angry. “Real great. Maybe if I thought I had some ‘buddies’ around here I’d buy all this teamwork crap I keep hearing. Every move I make gets me nothing but grief. If it isn’t from Strauss or from one of you guys, it’s from one of the sergeants—or from Gunny Trent. I’m not a part of your team, and I don’t think I ever will be!”
“Not with that attitude you won’t, kid,” Rostov said bluntly. “You’ll be accepted by the Legion just as soon as you show you’re really a legionnaire, not before. As long as you keep playing games, though, don’t expect anybody to think you’re anything but a dumb nube.”
“Enough talk!” Corporal Strauss shouted from outside. “Get back to vork!”
Slick turned back to the nearest box and started shoving it down the ramp, attacking it with some of the fury seething inside of him. Rostov was right about the mistakes he’d made in the fight with the hannies, but the rest…! The harder he tried to understand the Legion, the worse things got. It wasn’t like he had volunteered; the court had forced him to join. And it seemed as if there was no way he’d ever fit in on their terms.
All he could do, he decided, was survive.
* * *
“Can’t you push this thing any faster, Mason?” Fraser asked irritably as the Sabertooth slowed down to swing wide around another tight-packed clump of trees.
Sergeant Paul Mason didn’t even raise his head from the monitor screen in front of him. “Not unless you want to tear the guts out of her, Lieutenant,” he said gruffly. He had the sound of a man protecting a child.
“Survey map says it thins out in another few klicks, sir,” Legionnaire Tran said from behind Fraser. He was filling in for Garcia, since she was still recovering from her injury, and what he lacked in technical expertise he made up for in enthusiasm. “We can make better time there.”
Mason grunted. “Yeah. Maybe.”
It had been a frustrating two-hour trek. Following the line of the radio signal Garcia had picked up, the three Legion vehicles had travelled deep into the jungle. Fraser had been tempted to turn back when it became clear that they weren’t heading for any of the three Charlie Company outposts, but his conscience wouldn’t allow him to act until he was sure. They’d been delayed repeatedly by the dense jungle growth. In places the short, twisted trees were so tightly intertwined that they seemed like a single organism. Patches like that were impenetrable to men and machines alike, and the only option was to change course and seek an easier way around the obstacle. With Mason worried that the Sabertooth and the two APCs might suffer the same kind of damage as the crippled supply van, they were forced to proceed at a painfully slow pace.
Fraser had been thinking of the detachment as a “flying column.” The phrase rang in his mind like a feeble joke now.
By now the main body would be moving again, and each passing hour would widen the gap between them. It would cost more precious time if they had to stop so Fraser’s party could catch up … but the alternative, keeping the tiny Legion force divided in the heart of a hostile country, was unthinkable.
Another choice gone wrong.…
“I’m getting something, Lieutenant,” Tran said suddenly. He was holding a headphone to one ear. “Sounds like … yeah, that’s Russo. Charlie Company’s command C3 tech. I think they’re under attack!”
Fraser took the headphones and slipped them over his ears. Static made the signal ragged.
“…get the damned Fafnirs over on the left … too late!”
“That’s firm … bastards moving up the road …”
“Sub’s been hit! Tell Baker to get a medic down here…! Where’s the Sarge? He’s in charge now!”
Handing the phones back to Tran, Fraser looked down at the C3 terminal balanced on the legionnaire’s knees. “Do you have a line on them?”
“Yes, sir. And Garcia’s feeding us a second line from the command van. Looks like they’re right about … here.” The terminal’s map display showed two lines intersecting at a point about twenty kilometers away. Tran touched a stud and a detail map replaced the first. Fraser bent forward to examine it.
The lines touched at an open area labelled “Shelton’s Head.” It was at least 110 kilometers from any of the three outposts where Charlie Company’s platoons had been stationed … more like 200 klicks from the site of the company HQ, where Russo would have been stationed.
“What have you got on this place, Tran?” he asked, pointing to the name.
Tran called to the data from the computer. “It’s a zyglyn plantation, Lieutenant,” the Viet legionnaire said. “Head of the trail. Surveyed by a free-lancer working for StelPhar by the name of Shelton … ten years back. Seems Shelton and his wife struck a private deal with some of the local growers and settled there after he retired. It was Shelton who convinced StelPhar to open the trail from Monkeyville up to his place.”
Fraser nodded slowly. “So … if they got cut off from Monkeyville, some of the people from Charlie Company might have holed up with this Shelton.”
“Looks that way, sir,” Tran agreed.
Fraser studied the map again. “On the other hand, it still could be a trap. We don’t have any proof that those signals are coming in live. They might have been recorded.”
“Maybe so, sir,” the legionnaire said. “But if they pulled back here, it would explain why the Sarge couldn’t raise them when he did his recon the other night.”
“Maybe so.” Fraser frowned. “Damn! I wish we had the command van so we weren’t going in blind. Drones’d be real handy right about now.”
“Won’t take long to call for one, Lieutenant,” Tran told him. “Let me get Garcia for you.”
He hadn’t been thinking in terms of help from the main body … hadn’t been thinking at all, in fact. Of course Garcia could send drones in to scout out the area; flying high over the jungle they’d be over Shelton’s Head by the time his slow-moving vehicles made it overland.
Fraser clenched his fists. He couldn’t afford to lose track of his assets like that. Not if he wanted to keep his men alive.
“All right, Tran. Get on it.” He turned back toward the driver’s cab. “You have the coords, Mason? Then rev it as much as you can. If those signals are the real thing, we’ve got men in trouble out there.”
It felt good to have a clear course of action for a change. Fraser almost smiled as he strapped himself back into a seat and braced himself against the motion as the Sabertooth increased speed.
But the smile didn’t quite come. He was all too aware of how little he really knew about commanding men in battle. And this time he didn’t have Sergeant Trent to help him if he got in trouble.
This time, Fraser was on his own.